Saturday, November 19, 2016
Friday, November 18, 2016
Fight the Power! (With Safety Pins)
[ed. Sorry to go on and on about worthless signalling efforts, but if you really want to change government why not just flash the peace sign? It's cheaper and you can't argue with success! (plus, you might need the pins later to keep your rags together). Seriously, if you really want change, support unions, support strikes and walkouts (private and government), support boycotts against corporations and banks, and vote! Do something tangible like Solidarity in Poland and there might be, possibly, hopefully, some reasonable chance of a real populist revolution. See also: Mark Zuckerberg is in Denial.]
Eggplant. Cilantro. Theater kids. The world is full of polarizing things that humanity will never agree on. Some of those emotions are irrational, while others are based in fact (eggplant, theater kids).
And the most divisive object in post-election United States right now might be a safety pin.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the safety pin has emerged as a symbol of unity: a way for people — regardless of their politics — to show they are allies and do not stand for the kind of violence and abuse that has emerged and been reported on since Trump was elected last week.
Wearing a safety pin began as a gesture of kindness. But some people also see it as a performative, bullshit type of "slacktivism," arguing that it allows people to pat themselves on the back without actually trying to fix the problems they say are important.
The safety pin is now at the center of a national conversation about hate crimes, prompting the discussion about the facile shallowness of white men and women and what good comes out of the backlash against such gestures of solidarity.
by Alex Abad-Santos, Vox | Read more:
Image: Christine Pedretti via Shutterstock
Eggplant. Cilantro. Theater kids. The world is full of polarizing things that humanity will never agree on. Some of those emotions are irrational, while others are based in fact (eggplant, theater kids).
And the most divisive object in post-election United States right now might be a safety pin.In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the safety pin has emerged as a symbol of unity: a way for people — regardless of their politics — to show they are allies and do not stand for the kind of violence and abuse that has emerged and been reported on since Trump was elected last week.
Wearing a safety pin began as a gesture of kindness. But some people also see it as a performative, bullshit type of "slacktivism," arguing that it allows people to pat themselves on the back without actually trying to fix the problems they say are important.
The safety pin is now at the center of a national conversation about hate crimes, prompting the discussion about the facile shallowness of white men and women and what good comes out of the backlash against such gestures of solidarity.
by Alex Abad-Santos, Vox | Read more:
Image: Christine Pedretti via Shutterstock
The Sad Rush and Dark Power of Firing a Gun
[ed. One of my best friends managed the Rabbit Creek rifle range in Alaska for years and years. We'd get together and shoot once in a while. Some of the experiences he told me about would make my brain explode. See also: Confessions of a Gun Range Worker]
In the parking lot, Scott had his red cap pulled down low over his face. I could see only the shadows on his chin. We shook hands, introduced ourselves. “You don’t have to do this,” I said. He kind of snorted and did not answer, turned and opened the hatch of his SUV, pulled out a duffel bag. His shoulder sagged with its weight as he held it by its handles in one hand. “Ready?” he said. He headed toward the door. I followed.
At the door a big sweaty guy came out grinning, face flushed, a big semiautomatic pistol on each hip. He held up his hands and he passed, gave us high fives, saying, “Beautiful day to be an American!” Scott held the door for me. “You ever do this before?” he said. “Nuh uh,” I said and started to explain, defend myself, but Scott cut me off and said it didn’t matter, that I was here now. I started to tell him why I wanted to do this—because I wanted to know what it was like—but Scott did not want to hear that either. He said, “I’m just happy you’re here.”
We were outside the end unit of a business park in northern Virginia, a generally upscale metro-area region outside of Washington, DC the rest of Virginia, where they still have southern accents, considers snooty. From outside, it might have been an orthodontist’s office. It was clean, new, with black windows and ample parking. Inside it might have been a bowling alley. But when you walked in the first thing you heard was not the crashing of pins but incessant gun fire. It was visceral, exciting. Bowling alleys have bags and balls and those silly shirts for sale up front but here they sold heavy-duty double breasted shooting shirts, knives, bullets, rifle scopes, military grade weaponry. A customer was shopping for a semiautomatic pistol, a big bearded salesman showing him various options. It was an intimate interaction, they were murmuring to each other, gravely examining the body of each opened-up weapon. There was a desk where instead of renting shoes you rented guns. There were no pitchers of beer for sale, no nachos—only water and soda via vending machines. Bowling alleys have those screens overhead showing the scores and the big X when someone gets a strike, and the gun range had screens overhead too but they were television screens showing cable news. (...)
It was a Saturday in spring and the range was packed, so we had to wait for a lane. I was surprised by who was there: the solitary middle-aged white men I expected, yes, but also a black couple on what seemed to be a good first date, an entire Asian family, a group of young men and women who from their style would not have been out of place at a National concert, a couple of guys who I guessed were Central American wearing military-like uniforms here training for God knows what. It was the same people I would have seen if I’d have gone to the nearby public park instead. The difference was everybody was focused and alert. Nobody was lost in their phone, or bumping into each other, or staring into space. There was minimal frivolity in the air, maximum seriousness. Because you had to pay attention at all times to what you were doing. Your every action had to be mindful, deliberate. Because you and everyone around you had a gun.
Scott and I sat on the couch while we waited. Rather, I sat and Scott squatted before me, unzipping his duffel bag and pulling out firearms as I stared down at the top of his hat. “We’re going to shoot three types of firearms today,” Scott said. He introduced them to me one at a time: a Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol which, Scott said, is what cops often use; a little five-shot .38 revolver which, Scott said, cops carry on their ankles for backup incase something happens to their Glock; and, lastly, an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle, the type of gun used in most mass shootings including Newtown, San Bernardino, Aurora, and Orlando (it’s also called an assault rifle, though not by anyone you’d find at the gun range—that’s a political term liberals use, and an inaccurate one too that betrays one’s ignorance of firearms). A good introductory lineup.
Scott was now showing me how to hold the Glock. When Gaston Glock invented it, he had no experience with guns and therefore did not know there even was a proper way to hold one, so he made up his own way and when the gun became dominant in the marketplace everyone had to learn how to hold it. To show me how, Scott did not have me hold the actual Glock which would have been a no-no because we were not yet in the shooting gallery. It did not matter if the gun was unloaded—it would have been a breach of safety and general public decency. Therefore Scott had brought a fake gun, just a gun-shaped piece of plastic, bright blue so no one could mistake it. He put it in my hands then bent and twisted my thumbs and fingers until I was holding it the way Gaston Glock wanted me: thumbs pointing out away from the body on either side of the barrel, left forefinger extended along that side, left hand cupping the right. It felt unnatural and uncomfortable and not tough at all. Your whole body tries to crouch behind the gun ridiculously, like a St. Bernard trying to hide behind a mouse. I told Scott this. He said you have to train your hands until eventually it becomes second nature. That way you can hold it properly without even thinking about it, in the middle of the night, half asleep, someone breaking in to your house. I asked how to train my hands and he said dry firing. You have to dry fire constantly. Always be dry firing. I did not know what dry firing is. He explained it is shooting an empty gun. He said it’s a good idea, when you’re home, on the couch, vegging out in front of the TV, to have your unloaded gun in your hand in the proper grip, pulling the trigger on it over and over until it feels normal. Have the gun on the coffee table, reach over, pick it up, pull the trigger. Do that repeatedly, always. You should have your firearm within reach at all times anyways, he said. I asked Scott if he does that and he said yes, he was doing it last night as a matter of fact. I asked if his wife minds it. He started to answer but seemed to think better of whatever he was about to say and instead said nothing, turned his attention to loading bullets into the guns’ ammunition magazines, giving me tips as he did so about home defense, saying how a Glock is better than something like a shotgun because it allows for more maneuverability if your enemy is right on top of you. (...)
From where I was sitting, past Scott’s head, I could see the people in the gallery shooting. It was startling and dystopian seeing such ordinary strangers now standing side-by-side with rifles and handguns unloading clips of live ammo. This was an unseen side of us. Our violence visible. It felt incredible this was allowed, it seemed insane and dangerous, something that should have been happening not in this suburb with all its garbage collection regulations and home owner association ordinances but off in a desert somewhere. I do not mean to say it felt wrong or bad—just the opposite, it felt exciting and great. Like I was being shown a new dimension behind humdrum day-to-day modern life that everyone had been in on but me. All you did was show up, pay for a lane, and start blasting. Anyone at anytime could have made a fatal error, or a nefarious decision. And we were all okay with it. We placed so much trust in each other just by being there. It did not matter that we were strangers to one another. In fact, it felt like we were not strangers at all. I’d felt more nervous on the street driving a car. Maybe, I thought, I wanted this. Maybe I had been doing life wrong, by not doing this, by not being a gun guy, or owning one, by being critical of those who do. Maybe I was a bloodless urban pussy with no trust in human beings, no joie de vivre, who was not taking advantage of being an American, who was not appreciative of being one. Maybe American rights had been wasted on me. Maybe Scott was so eager to help me and ask nothing in return because he felt the way I might if someone came up to me and asked me to help them vote for the first time. Maybe going to the gun range, I thought, is basically like voting. But with lethal force.
A lane opened up. Our turn. Scott had me put on big green earmuffs and protective eyewear. We entered.
Inside the gallery the shooting was intensely loud. Even with the earmuffs the boomboombooms penetrated my skull, you felt them in your sternum. It was smoky and smelled like sulfur, from all the gunpowder. It was hot. Spent shells were all over the ground, you kicked them as you walked. Everything was concrete, like an unfinished basement. The Central American paramilitary guys were shooting semiautomatic versions of AK-47s, their rounds making big bright sparks as they struck the concrete backstop. They had handcuffs on their belts, big black stormtrooper boots. No one seemed to be paying attention to them. They were trusted, just as I was. Just by being in that room with them I was trusting them, and vice versa. It felt remarkable that no one had stopped me before this point to ask me who I was or why I was here or to make sure I was not drunk or crazy—I had interacted with nobody but Scott up until this point and here I was about to start blasting.
Many people were using those paper life-size human silhouette targets, but Scott, shouting to be heard, said he prefers not to use those, because in real life situations, due to many reasons including darkness or adrenaline, most of your shooting skills will go out the window no matter how much time you have spent on the couch dry firing. But if you have been training on a very small target, your muscle memory will once again kick in and you’ll miss a little less severely, you’ll still be more likely to hit your enemy in an area of the body that will kill him quickly. “And the area of his body that will kill him quickly,” Scott said, “producing from his back pocket a 3 x 5 index card, is about the size of a 3 x 5 index card.” Scott slapped a black bull’s-eye sticker on the card, clipped it to the target holder and sent it down range a few feet. He gave me the loaded Glock. It was very heavy. I liked its substantial presence. It felt perfect in my hand, a natural extension of it. Scott stood behind me, his arms around me, both of our hands on the loaded gun. He put me like a doll into proper grip, stance. He kicked at my feet, to get me to widen them. I could feel his body’s warmth, smell his breath. How often did two straight white men stand like this? It was part of the intimacy, part of the experience.
He did something to the side of the gun then shouted into my ear that the safety was now off. “Okay,” he shouted, “when you’re ready, take a deep breath in, and as you exhale pull the trigger back smoothly and steadily all the way back without stopping.” He let go of me. Stepped back. All alone now. I was trembling, energy coming to boil inside my veins. I did not know what to expect or what it would feel like. I inhaled, exhaled, pulled the trigger. The gun came to life. It felt like an animal in my hands, like I was choking a coyote. You had to dominate it. You had to be a man. You had to kill it. It only came to life for a brief moment, then the life was gone—not dead, just gone again. I made a big boom that joined with all the other ones from my fellow shooters. The firing felt removed from the life. I was not sure a bullet had in fact shot out. I had to shout back at Scott over my shoulder to ask him if it had worked, very conscious about keeping the gun pointed down range. Scott had come to life too, he was jumping up and down behind me, the life had gone from the gun into him. He had pushed the brim of his hat back on his head, revealing his face for the first time. It looked completely different from how I thought it would—younger, rounder, thinner. He was grinning like a proud father. He seemed happy and naked, eyes bright. I could not imagine this man alone on the couch pulling the trigger on an empty gun. He slapped me on the shoulder. “That’s it!” he cried. “Do it again!” I did. This time it was easier, and I saw the shell casing come flipping out the top of the gun as it fired, it landed on my wrist, warm. “See?” Scott shouted, pointing at the target. A neon green nick had appeared on the edge, meaning that’s where I’d hit it. Not much of a hole, you could hardly see it. Entrance wound, I guessed.
He had me pause, showed me that I had to line up the sights of the guns—there were two, one at the front and one at the back—and that when I aimed I had to focus on the sights themselves and let what I was shooting blur behind them. You had to almost not see what you were shooting, who you were shooting. You had to forget about it, forget about them, forget about everything else and pay attention only to yourself and your gun. I tried that—aimed at the target, imagined it a person. The hell with them, I told myself. Me and my gun, me and my gun. I pulled the trigger, obliterated the bull’s-eye. Fatal shot to the heart.
Scott whooped, clapped me on the shoulder again. I could hear him faintly behind me, amid the firing: “Yeah! Outstanding! Outstanding!” I felt good. It had been so long since I’d had somebody react to me the way Scott was. He was on my side, he wanted to help me, to teach me how to defend myself and my family. When was the last time a stranger was on my side and wanted to help me, without condition, simply because I had asked him? I could not remember. As I emptied that magazine, clustering my shots around the bull’s-eye, I was gushing sweat. We all were, in the gallery. It was our exhilaration, our energy. Our shared decency. My eyewear was fogging up, I could see very little, but I did not care, I could see the sights of my gun clearly enough, and I could tell from Scott’s cheering that I was shredding the bull’s-eye over and over. Eventually the gun stopped firing, which meant I had emptied it. It happened too quickly. That’s it? Scott took the gun and reloaded me, then I emptied that clip too, and then another. The bullets I was using cost money, they were Scott’s, he had paid for them, and they were not cheap—but he would not let me reimburse him, he would not hear of it. Just glad you’re here, he kept saying.
At the door a big sweaty guy came out grinning, face flushed, a big semiautomatic pistol on each hip. He held up his hands and he passed, gave us high fives, saying, “Beautiful day to be an American!” Scott held the door for me. “You ever do this before?” he said. “Nuh uh,” I said and started to explain, defend myself, but Scott cut me off and said it didn’t matter, that I was here now. I started to tell him why I wanted to do this—because I wanted to know what it was like—but Scott did not want to hear that either. He said, “I’m just happy you’re here.”
We were outside the end unit of a business park in northern Virginia, a generally upscale metro-area region outside of Washington, DC the rest of Virginia, where they still have southern accents, considers snooty. From outside, it might have been an orthodontist’s office. It was clean, new, with black windows and ample parking. Inside it might have been a bowling alley. But when you walked in the first thing you heard was not the crashing of pins but incessant gun fire. It was visceral, exciting. Bowling alleys have bags and balls and those silly shirts for sale up front but here they sold heavy-duty double breasted shooting shirts, knives, bullets, rifle scopes, military grade weaponry. A customer was shopping for a semiautomatic pistol, a big bearded salesman showing him various options. It was an intimate interaction, they were murmuring to each other, gravely examining the body of each opened-up weapon. There was a desk where instead of renting shoes you rented guns. There were no pitchers of beer for sale, no nachos—only water and soda via vending machines. Bowling alleys have those screens overhead showing the scores and the big X when someone gets a strike, and the gun range had screens overhead too but they were television screens showing cable news. (...)It was a Saturday in spring and the range was packed, so we had to wait for a lane. I was surprised by who was there: the solitary middle-aged white men I expected, yes, but also a black couple on what seemed to be a good first date, an entire Asian family, a group of young men and women who from their style would not have been out of place at a National concert, a couple of guys who I guessed were Central American wearing military-like uniforms here training for God knows what. It was the same people I would have seen if I’d have gone to the nearby public park instead. The difference was everybody was focused and alert. Nobody was lost in their phone, or bumping into each other, or staring into space. There was minimal frivolity in the air, maximum seriousness. Because you had to pay attention at all times to what you were doing. Your every action had to be mindful, deliberate. Because you and everyone around you had a gun.
Scott and I sat on the couch while we waited. Rather, I sat and Scott squatted before me, unzipping his duffel bag and pulling out firearms as I stared down at the top of his hat. “We’re going to shoot three types of firearms today,” Scott said. He introduced them to me one at a time: a Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol which, Scott said, is what cops often use; a little five-shot .38 revolver which, Scott said, cops carry on their ankles for backup incase something happens to their Glock; and, lastly, an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle, the type of gun used in most mass shootings including Newtown, San Bernardino, Aurora, and Orlando (it’s also called an assault rifle, though not by anyone you’d find at the gun range—that’s a political term liberals use, and an inaccurate one too that betrays one’s ignorance of firearms). A good introductory lineup.
Scott was now showing me how to hold the Glock. When Gaston Glock invented it, he had no experience with guns and therefore did not know there even was a proper way to hold one, so he made up his own way and when the gun became dominant in the marketplace everyone had to learn how to hold it. To show me how, Scott did not have me hold the actual Glock which would have been a no-no because we were not yet in the shooting gallery. It did not matter if the gun was unloaded—it would have been a breach of safety and general public decency. Therefore Scott had brought a fake gun, just a gun-shaped piece of plastic, bright blue so no one could mistake it. He put it in my hands then bent and twisted my thumbs and fingers until I was holding it the way Gaston Glock wanted me: thumbs pointing out away from the body on either side of the barrel, left forefinger extended along that side, left hand cupping the right. It felt unnatural and uncomfortable and not tough at all. Your whole body tries to crouch behind the gun ridiculously, like a St. Bernard trying to hide behind a mouse. I told Scott this. He said you have to train your hands until eventually it becomes second nature. That way you can hold it properly without even thinking about it, in the middle of the night, half asleep, someone breaking in to your house. I asked how to train my hands and he said dry firing. You have to dry fire constantly. Always be dry firing. I did not know what dry firing is. He explained it is shooting an empty gun. He said it’s a good idea, when you’re home, on the couch, vegging out in front of the TV, to have your unloaded gun in your hand in the proper grip, pulling the trigger on it over and over until it feels normal. Have the gun on the coffee table, reach over, pick it up, pull the trigger. Do that repeatedly, always. You should have your firearm within reach at all times anyways, he said. I asked Scott if he does that and he said yes, he was doing it last night as a matter of fact. I asked if his wife minds it. He started to answer but seemed to think better of whatever he was about to say and instead said nothing, turned his attention to loading bullets into the guns’ ammunition magazines, giving me tips as he did so about home defense, saying how a Glock is better than something like a shotgun because it allows for more maneuverability if your enemy is right on top of you. (...)
From where I was sitting, past Scott’s head, I could see the people in the gallery shooting. It was startling and dystopian seeing such ordinary strangers now standing side-by-side with rifles and handguns unloading clips of live ammo. This was an unseen side of us. Our violence visible. It felt incredible this was allowed, it seemed insane and dangerous, something that should have been happening not in this suburb with all its garbage collection regulations and home owner association ordinances but off in a desert somewhere. I do not mean to say it felt wrong or bad—just the opposite, it felt exciting and great. Like I was being shown a new dimension behind humdrum day-to-day modern life that everyone had been in on but me. All you did was show up, pay for a lane, and start blasting. Anyone at anytime could have made a fatal error, or a nefarious decision. And we were all okay with it. We placed so much trust in each other just by being there. It did not matter that we were strangers to one another. In fact, it felt like we were not strangers at all. I’d felt more nervous on the street driving a car. Maybe, I thought, I wanted this. Maybe I had been doing life wrong, by not doing this, by not being a gun guy, or owning one, by being critical of those who do. Maybe I was a bloodless urban pussy with no trust in human beings, no joie de vivre, who was not taking advantage of being an American, who was not appreciative of being one. Maybe American rights had been wasted on me. Maybe Scott was so eager to help me and ask nothing in return because he felt the way I might if someone came up to me and asked me to help them vote for the first time. Maybe going to the gun range, I thought, is basically like voting. But with lethal force.
A lane opened up. Our turn. Scott had me put on big green earmuffs and protective eyewear. We entered.
Inside the gallery the shooting was intensely loud. Even with the earmuffs the boomboombooms penetrated my skull, you felt them in your sternum. It was smoky and smelled like sulfur, from all the gunpowder. It was hot. Spent shells were all over the ground, you kicked them as you walked. Everything was concrete, like an unfinished basement. The Central American paramilitary guys were shooting semiautomatic versions of AK-47s, their rounds making big bright sparks as they struck the concrete backstop. They had handcuffs on their belts, big black stormtrooper boots. No one seemed to be paying attention to them. They were trusted, just as I was. Just by being in that room with them I was trusting them, and vice versa. It felt remarkable that no one had stopped me before this point to ask me who I was or why I was here or to make sure I was not drunk or crazy—I had interacted with nobody but Scott up until this point and here I was about to start blasting.
Many people were using those paper life-size human silhouette targets, but Scott, shouting to be heard, said he prefers not to use those, because in real life situations, due to many reasons including darkness or adrenaline, most of your shooting skills will go out the window no matter how much time you have spent on the couch dry firing. But if you have been training on a very small target, your muscle memory will once again kick in and you’ll miss a little less severely, you’ll still be more likely to hit your enemy in an area of the body that will kill him quickly. “And the area of his body that will kill him quickly,” Scott said, “producing from his back pocket a 3 x 5 index card, is about the size of a 3 x 5 index card.” Scott slapped a black bull’s-eye sticker on the card, clipped it to the target holder and sent it down range a few feet. He gave me the loaded Glock. It was very heavy. I liked its substantial presence. It felt perfect in my hand, a natural extension of it. Scott stood behind me, his arms around me, both of our hands on the loaded gun. He put me like a doll into proper grip, stance. He kicked at my feet, to get me to widen them. I could feel his body’s warmth, smell his breath. How often did two straight white men stand like this? It was part of the intimacy, part of the experience.
He did something to the side of the gun then shouted into my ear that the safety was now off. “Okay,” he shouted, “when you’re ready, take a deep breath in, and as you exhale pull the trigger back smoothly and steadily all the way back without stopping.” He let go of me. Stepped back. All alone now. I was trembling, energy coming to boil inside my veins. I did not know what to expect or what it would feel like. I inhaled, exhaled, pulled the trigger. The gun came to life. It felt like an animal in my hands, like I was choking a coyote. You had to dominate it. You had to be a man. You had to kill it. It only came to life for a brief moment, then the life was gone—not dead, just gone again. I made a big boom that joined with all the other ones from my fellow shooters. The firing felt removed from the life. I was not sure a bullet had in fact shot out. I had to shout back at Scott over my shoulder to ask him if it had worked, very conscious about keeping the gun pointed down range. Scott had come to life too, he was jumping up and down behind me, the life had gone from the gun into him. He had pushed the brim of his hat back on his head, revealing his face for the first time. It looked completely different from how I thought it would—younger, rounder, thinner. He was grinning like a proud father. He seemed happy and naked, eyes bright. I could not imagine this man alone on the couch pulling the trigger on an empty gun. He slapped me on the shoulder. “That’s it!” he cried. “Do it again!” I did. This time it was easier, and I saw the shell casing come flipping out the top of the gun as it fired, it landed on my wrist, warm. “See?” Scott shouted, pointing at the target. A neon green nick had appeared on the edge, meaning that’s where I’d hit it. Not much of a hole, you could hardly see it. Entrance wound, I guessed.
He had me pause, showed me that I had to line up the sights of the guns—there were two, one at the front and one at the back—and that when I aimed I had to focus on the sights themselves and let what I was shooting blur behind them. You had to almost not see what you were shooting, who you were shooting. You had to forget about it, forget about them, forget about everything else and pay attention only to yourself and your gun. I tried that—aimed at the target, imagined it a person. The hell with them, I told myself. Me and my gun, me and my gun. I pulled the trigger, obliterated the bull’s-eye. Fatal shot to the heart.
Scott whooped, clapped me on the shoulder again. I could hear him faintly behind me, amid the firing: “Yeah! Outstanding! Outstanding!” I felt good. It had been so long since I’d had somebody react to me the way Scott was. He was on my side, he wanted to help me, to teach me how to defend myself and my family. When was the last time a stranger was on my side and wanted to help me, without condition, simply because I had asked him? I could not remember. As I emptied that magazine, clustering my shots around the bull’s-eye, I was gushing sweat. We all were, in the gallery. It was our exhilaration, our energy. Our shared decency. My eyewear was fogging up, I could see very little, but I did not care, I could see the sights of my gun clearly enough, and I could tell from Scott’s cheering that I was shredding the bull’s-eye over and over. Eventually the gun stopped firing, which meant I had emptied it. It happened too quickly. That’s it? Scott took the gun and reloaded me, then I emptied that clip too, and then another. The bullets I was using cost money, they were Scott’s, he had paid for them, and they were not cheap—but he would not let me reimburse him, he would not hear of it. Just glad you’re here, he kept saying.
Responsible Hedonists
For nearly half a century, the San Francisco Bay Area has loomed in the American imagination as the destination for social permissiveness. Berkeley is the haven of unwashed, drum-circling hippies and left-wing academics. Oakland incubates radicals who convene vegan potlucks in moldering punk houses and lob Molotov cocktails during protests. And San Francisco is the epicenter of free and queer love, the home of Haight-Ashbury, Harvey Milk’s beloved Castro District, and sex-positive feminist Annie Sprinkle’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
But if sex is still free in the Bay Area, little else is. (...)
Bay Area class polarization constitutes the backdrop for journalist Emily Witt’s new book Future Sex, a series of forays into the area’s sex-based subcultures in the years after the financial crash. The book had its origin in a personal moment of truth: After the end of a relationship, Witt found herself contending with a thirtysomething sexual malaise. Waiting in a clinic for a chlamydia test, she realized that she was disenchanted with her new routine of informal sex with “nonboyfriends,” but equally unsettled by the thought of heterosexual monogamy as the natural termination of her dating life. After deciding to use “the West Coast and journalism as alibis” for checking out freer forms of love and sex, she absconded to San Francisco to explore her options. As Witt puts it early in the book: “When your life does not conform to an idea, and this failure makes you feel bad, throwing away the idea can make you feel better.”
In San Francisco, Witt is surprised by what she finds: Love is both freer and more constrained than she had imagined. She attends a live humiliation-porn shoot at the warehouse studio of Kink.com and tries a high-end sexual therapy called “orgasmic meditation.” She plumbs the depths of the webcam site Chaturbate, on which performers masturbate with toy trains for strangers, among other activities, and samples drugs with tech-industry polyamorists at sex parties and in the orgy dome at Burning Man.
Witt’s journey into the Bay Area’s sexual underground has been described as a memoir, but none of her experiences pave the way to a personal epiphany. Instead, they allow her to act as a kind of ethnographer of the Bay Area affluent. An upwardly mobile urbanite with the time and the means to experiment, Witt’s sojourn in San Francisco finds her visiting the same coffee shops as Google managers and yoga practitioners who discuss “coregasms” It’s a group with a high incidence of overlap with the subcultures she explores. Her role as a participant-observer means that they all serve as opportunities to uncover something about her own desires, but they also allow her to peer into the social lives and sexual practices of the elite at the turn of the millennium. While Future Sex may have been started as an effort to find sexual and romantic authenticity outside of traditional relationships, the resulting document is just as much about how class and money operate as determining (if not always immediately visible) forces even in the most intimate aspects of our lives. (...)
Future Sex is framed as a work of self- exploration, and Witt’s overarching mission—to locate her desires on the axis of 21st-century sexual freedom—is meant to unify the book’s chapters, several of which have been previously published as stand-alone magazine pieces. But this presumed motivation fades somewhat in these darkly funny and perceptive field studies. “Voyeur” implies a bit too much sexual intention for Witt’s project; in venturing into these scenes, she isn’t a Peeping Tom so much as a curious shopper. Her deadpan delivery makes Future Sex a work of social observation and, at times, even a kind of nonfiction comedy of manners. Behind her adventures seems to lurk the question: Are the rich simply gentrifying once-countercultural forms of living and partying, or have some modes of experimentation always been compatible with a certain degree of affluence?
Witt notes that Burning Man—which bills itself, among other things, as a “creative autonomous zone”—happens to suit the masters of the universe very well: Out in the desert, one can enter the orgy dome on Saturday and return to one’s job at Facebook on Monday. “The $400 ticket price,” she notes, “was as much about the right to leave what happened at Burning Man behind as it was to enter in the first place.” (...)
One of Witt’s chapters, “Polyamory,” examines how some young people are attempting to achieve this kind of utopian future in their everyday lives. But even with deliberate sexual promiscuity—which should theoretically be free—economic and social capital present certain benefits.
Witt’s polyamorist subjects, Elizabeth and Wes, are a young, hyper-successful tech couple representative of a new crop of Bay Area residents who “had grown up eating sugar-free cereal, swaddled in Polar Fleece jackets made from recycled plastic bottles.” These young adults, having graduated from prestigious colleges and landed high-paying jobs working 70 hours a week, now consume expensive groceries and patronize “coffee shops where the production of espresso was ritualized to resemble a historic reenactment of the hardships of nineteenth-century pioneer life.” (...)
For Elizabeth and Wes, this “modified commitment” includes sex parties, nights spent with other lovers, and eventually inviting their co-worker and friend Chris into the arrangement. And for Witt as an observer, it represents something encouraging, if not downright desirable. “I envied their community of friends,” she confesses, and “the openness with which they shared their attractions.”
Yet this openness can, at times, also seem like strenuous work. It relies upon a highly ordered system of rules, codes, earnestness, shared Google Docs, reading lists, and “the treatment of feelings as individual specimens, wrapped in cotton and carefully labeled.” And the Taylorized way the polyamorists organize their experimentation by night uncannily mirrors their output for their tech employers during the day. As Witt puts it, “It was as if the precocity they showed in their professional lives extended into an extreme pragmatism about sex.”
This, she soon realizes, is one of the signature features of this new phase in Bay Area licentiousness. The ethos of Witt’s polyamorists, if not the practice itself, is endemic to the Silicon Valley set: “When they talked about their coworkers in the Bay Area, Chris and Wes sometimes discussed the culture of ‘hyperbolic optimism,’ which they defined as a genuine commitment to the idea that all things were possible.”
“Responsible hedonism” is another Bayism that circulates “only half-jokingly” among their peers, and is perhaps no better exemplified than when Elizabeth throws a lavish loft sex party—complete with satin sheets and artful photographs of the host penetrating herself with a dildo—but first purchases liability insurance for the stripper pole. It turns out that free love can sometimes cost quite a lot.
But if sex is still free in the Bay Area, little else is. (...)
In San Francisco, Witt is surprised by what she finds: Love is both freer and more constrained than she had imagined. She attends a live humiliation-porn shoot at the warehouse studio of Kink.com and tries a high-end sexual therapy called “orgasmic meditation.” She plumbs the depths of the webcam site Chaturbate, on which performers masturbate with toy trains for strangers, among other activities, and samples drugs with tech-industry polyamorists at sex parties and in the orgy dome at Burning Man.Witt’s journey into the Bay Area’s sexual underground has been described as a memoir, but none of her experiences pave the way to a personal epiphany. Instead, they allow her to act as a kind of ethnographer of the Bay Area affluent. An upwardly mobile urbanite with the time and the means to experiment, Witt’s sojourn in San Francisco finds her visiting the same coffee shops as Google managers and yoga practitioners who discuss “coregasms” It’s a group with a high incidence of overlap with the subcultures she explores. Her role as a participant-observer means that they all serve as opportunities to uncover something about her own desires, but they also allow her to peer into the social lives and sexual practices of the elite at the turn of the millennium. While Future Sex may have been started as an effort to find sexual and romantic authenticity outside of traditional relationships, the resulting document is just as much about how class and money operate as determining (if not always immediately visible) forces even in the most intimate aspects of our lives. (...)
Future Sex is framed as a work of self- exploration, and Witt’s overarching mission—to locate her desires on the axis of 21st-century sexual freedom—is meant to unify the book’s chapters, several of which have been previously published as stand-alone magazine pieces. But this presumed motivation fades somewhat in these darkly funny and perceptive field studies. “Voyeur” implies a bit too much sexual intention for Witt’s project; in venturing into these scenes, she isn’t a Peeping Tom so much as a curious shopper. Her deadpan delivery makes Future Sex a work of social observation and, at times, even a kind of nonfiction comedy of manners. Behind her adventures seems to lurk the question: Are the rich simply gentrifying once-countercultural forms of living and partying, or have some modes of experimentation always been compatible with a certain degree of affluence?
Witt notes that Burning Man—which bills itself, among other things, as a “creative autonomous zone”—happens to suit the masters of the universe very well: Out in the desert, one can enter the orgy dome on Saturday and return to one’s job at Facebook on Monday. “The $400 ticket price,” she notes, “was as much about the right to leave what happened at Burning Man behind as it was to enter in the first place.” (...)
One of Witt’s chapters, “Polyamory,” examines how some young people are attempting to achieve this kind of utopian future in their everyday lives. But even with deliberate sexual promiscuity—which should theoretically be free—economic and social capital present certain benefits.
Witt’s polyamorist subjects, Elizabeth and Wes, are a young, hyper-successful tech couple representative of a new crop of Bay Area residents who “had grown up eating sugar-free cereal, swaddled in Polar Fleece jackets made from recycled plastic bottles.” These young adults, having graduated from prestigious colleges and landed high-paying jobs working 70 hours a week, now consume expensive groceries and patronize “coffee shops where the production of espresso was ritualized to resemble a historic reenactment of the hardships of nineteenth-century pioneer life.” (...)
For Elizabeth and Wes, this “modified commitment” includes sex parties, nights spent with other lovers, and eventually inviting their co-worker and friend Chris into the arrangement. And for Witt as an observer, it represents something encouraging, if not downright desirable. “I envied their community of friends,” she confesses, and “the openness with which they shared their attractions.”
Yet this openness can, at times, also seem like strenuous work. It relies upon a highly ordered system of rules, codes, earnestness, shared Google Docs, reading lists, and “the treatment of feelings as individual specimens, wrapped in cotton and carefully labeled.” And the Taylorized way the polyamorists organize their experimentation by night uncannily mirrors their output for their tech employers during the day. As Witt puts it, “It was as if the precocity they showed in their professional lives extended into an extreme pragmatism about sex.”
This, she soon realizes, is one of the signature features of this new phase in Bay Area licentiousness. The ethos of Witt’s polyamorists, if not the practice itself, is endemic to the Silicon Valley set: “When they talked about their coworkers in the Bay Area, Chris and Wes sometimes discussed the culture of ‘hyperbolic optimism,’ which they defined as a genuine commitment to the idea that all things were possible.”
“Responsible hedonism” is another Bayism that circulates “only half-jokingly” among their peers, and is perhaps no better exemplified than when Elizabeth throws a lavish loft sex party—complete with satin sheets and artful photographs of the host penetrating herself with a dildo—but first purchases liability insurance for the stripper pole. It turns out that free love can sometimes cost quite a lot.
by J.C. Pan, The Nation | Read more:
Image: Reno Gazette-Journal / AP
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Ronnie Earl
[ed. My personal favorite showcasing Ronnie's acoustic mastery: Song for a Sun (turn up the volume).]
Alaska's Oil Cash Now Comes With Automatic Voter Registration
[ed. Very few good results ever come out of an Alaskan election, but this is one of them.]
The same day Alaskans delivered their state to Donald Trump, they voted nearly two to one to embrace a progressive new voter-registration reform.
Under the new law, passed by referendum Tuesday, Alaskans who sign up to receive their annual payouts from the state’s oil wealth trust will also automatically be added to the state's voter rolls.
The vote makes Alaska the sixth state to have approved some form of automatic voter registration. Just two years ago, there were none.
"We should take advantage of any opportunity to cut waste and stop forcing people to fill out more and more forms," the state's U.S. senator, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, said in a statement celebrating the result.
More than 63 percent of Alaskans voted in favor of automatic registration, thanks in part to its almost comically broad range of supporters—including Sullivan, the Democrat he ousted in 2014, the state's other current U.S. senator, the state AARP and ACLU, BP, the Alaska Conservation Voters, unions, and industry groups.
“We have certain community members that need to cross rivers and drive 30 miles or 60 miles to a voting location,” Kim Reitmeier, the executive director of the Alaska Native business group ANCSA Regional Association and a co-chair of the campaign for the initiative, said in an interview in June. “Automatic voter registration is taking one step out of our crazy busy lives and trying to make it a little easier.”
Supporters say the law—which will give Alaskans the chance to opt out of being added to the rolls, rather than restrict voting to those who opt in by getting themselves registered—could create one of the most complete and accurate U.S. state voter registries of all time.
That’s because, rather than register people through the DMV, as other AVR states do, Alaska's new system will use the state’s Personal Fund Dividend Division, which handles its annual oil-wealth payouts. Not everyone gets a driver’s license, but in Alaska, almost nobody neglects to sign up each year to get their free dividend check.
Alaska's oil cash is unique, but its passage Tuesday of automatic registration underscores voting-rights advocates’ larger ambitions—to spread the policy beyond blue states and from the DMV to a wider range of agencies with access to citizens’ data. (...)
While all the automatic-registration systems before Alaska’s have been limited to using the DMV, advocates hope future states' laws will go further to automatically register citizens at agencies frequented by some nondrivers. A bill proposed last year in Maryland would have used social service agencies and the state’s Obamacare exchange but died in the state senate.
Not everyone is enthused. Republican governors in New Jersey and Illinois have vetoed their Democratic legislatures’ bills this year, citing concerns about fraud. While top elected Republicans embraced the referendum, and the Alaska GOP stayed neutral, some of its activists came out against it. “There are people out there who don’t know diddly squat about our country,” former state party chairman Peter Goldberg told the Alaska Dispatch News last month. “And I’m not comfortable with people that are totally ignorant about our system voting.”
Progressives say such arguments are undemocratic. “There’s no law that says that there should be a test of effort, availability, time, patience, and intelligence in order to vote,” says City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, who in the 1980s co-founded an advocacy group that helped pass the 1993 federal law requiring state agencies to give citizens more opportunities to register to vote, as when they're at the DMV. (States’ compliance with that law has fallen far short of supporters’ hopes.)
Automating voter registration, says Piven, would make it harder for governments to use registration requirements to disenfranchise would-be voters, as they’ve been doing since such requirements first became widespread after the Civil War. (One 1908 New York law, for example, created an obstacle for Jews by requiring voters to register in person either on a Saturday or on Yom Kippur.)
Many supporters see the new spate of automatic voter-registration bills being introduced at the state level as a sharp contrast to the much larger volume of new voting restrictions passed since the GOP’s 2010 down-ballot romp and the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act.
by Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: John Moore/Getty Images
The same day Alaskans delivered their state to Donald Trump, they voted nearly two to one to embrace a progressive new voter-registration reform.
Under the new law, passed by referendum Tuesday, Alaskans who sign up to receive their annual payouts from the state’s oil wealth trust will also automatically be added to the state's voter rolls.The vote makes Alaska the sixth state to have approved some form of automatic voter registration. Just two years ago, there were none.
"We should take advantage of any opportunity to cut waste and stop forcing people to fill out more and more forms," the state's U.S. senator, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, said in a statement celebrating the result.
More than 63 percent of Alaskans voted in favor of automatic registration, thanks in part to its almost comically broad range of supporters—including Sullivan, the Democrat he ousted in 2014, the state's other current U.S. senator, the state AARP and ACLU, BP, the Alaska Conservation Voters, unions, and industry groups.
“We have certain community members that need to cross rivers and drive 30 miles or 60 miles to a voting location,” Kim Reitmeier, the executive director of the Alaska Native business group ANCSA Regional Association and a co-chair of the campaign for the initiative, said in an interview in June. “Automatic voter registration is taking one step out of our crazy busy lives and trying to make it a little easier.”
Supporters say the law—which will give Alaskans the chance to opt out of being added to the rolls, rather than restrict voting to those who opt in by getting themselves registered—could create one of the most complete and accurate U.S. state voter registries of all time.
That’s because, rather than register people through the DMV, as other AVR states do, Alaska's new system will use the state’s Personal Fund Dividend Division, which handles its annual oil-wealth payouts. Not everyone gets a driver’s license, but in Alaska, almost nobody neglects to sign up each year to get their free dividend check.
Alaska's oil cash is unique, but its passage Tuesday of automatic registration underscores voting-rights advocates’ larger ambitions—to spread the policy beyond blue states and from the DMV to a wider range of agencies with access to citizens’ data. (...)
While all the automatic-registration systems before Alaska’s have been limited to using the DMV, advocates hope future states' laws will go further to automatically register citizens at agencies frequented by some nondrivers. A bill proposed last year in Maryland would have used social service agencies and the state’s Obamacare exchange but died in the state senate.
Not everyone is enthused. Republican governors in New Jersey and Illinois have vetoed their Democratic legislatures’ bills this year, citing concerns about fraud. While top elected Republicans embraced the referendum, and the Alaska GOP stayed neutral, some of its activists came out against it. “There are people out there who don’t know diddly squat about our country,” former state party chairman Peter Goldberg told the Alaska Dispatch News last month. “And I’m not comfortable with people that are totally ignorant about our system voting.”
Progressives say such arguments are undemocratic. “There’s no law that says that there should be a test of effort, availability, time, patience, and intelligence in order to vote,” says City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, who in the 1980s co-founded an advocacy group that helped pass the 1993 federal law requiring state agencies to give citizens more opportunities to register to vote, as when they're at the DMV. (States’ compliance with that law has fallen far short of supporters’ hopes.)
Automating voter registration, says Piven, would make it harder for governments to use registration requirements to disenfranchise would-be voters, as they’ve been doing since such requirements first became widespread after the Civil War. (One 1908 New York law, for example, created an obstacle for Jews by requiring voters to register in person either on a Saturday or on Yom Kippur.)
Many supporters see the new spate of automatic voter-registration bills being introduced at the state level as a sharp contrast to the much larger volume of new voting restrictions passed since the GOP’s 2010 down-ballot romp and the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act.
by Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: John Moore/Getty Images
How to Actually Win a Fist Fight
It has to be said, first sentence, first paragraph: the best way to win a fist fight is not to get into one in the first place.
No shit, Sherlock.
Every single mens’ magazine who has ever attempted to publish an article like this has started (and ended) exactly that way and is usually devoid of any real information – sometimes because someone on the editorial staff wanted to avoid putting the periodical at risk for a lawsuit; other times because the author has absolutely no clue what they’re talking about, so they cop out with this “Verbal Judo Wins The Day!” crap. In fact, that’s precisely why I wrote this guide in the first place.
It’s common sense – avoid fighting if at all possible. No one likes to get hit (and if you do, there’s no need to go crawling pubs to find it. There’s any number of clubs filled with rubber-suited men and women who will give you a safety word and a few bruises for the right price…). But sometimes, diplomacy erodes to a good old fashioned bust-up, or worse, your opponent is just a big bully who’s looking to drive a knuckle into your nose. In either case, you are – at some point in your life – going to be called upon to defend yourself.
So… What to do? Well, I can’t promise that the following information will turn you into a hands-of-steel cage fighter who can handle any MMA bruiser in a back-alley match… In fact, if you’re actually in NEED of the information in this article, I can guarantee you that a trained martial artist or fighter will destroy you. But all things being equal, if you’re simply an untrained person who’s facing a bully, or someone looking to simply get the basics under your belt in case something gnarly goes down, I can assure you that you’re way better off knowing this stuff than not.
Note: This guide has been on the net in some form or another for 9 years now. In that time, I’ve gotten lots and lots of feedback. I’ve decided to incorporate my notes on that feedback throughout this latest version. I’ve formatted those side notes like this — bold “Note:” and italic text — so you can tell at a glance which sections have been argued over (and over and over and over), and why I’ve decided to go with the advice that you read here.
Some things before we begin:
First, you need to know a few things:
You are going to get hit.
When you get hit, it does not feel good.
Knowing and accepting those two things as fact will free your mind up enough to begin thinking about much more important stuff, like strategy and technique. If you’re petrified with fear over how much it’s going to hurt when the big bad guy hits you, you’re going to be out of focus. Thus, you’ll be much more vulnerable to taking damage than if you can just accept the reality of the situation and move past it… And perhaps, walk into the situation with a bit of confidence.
Confidence CANNOT be overvalued in a fight situation. If you walk in knowing you will win, your chances of winning are far greater… If for no other reason than the fact that you will gain a psychological edge on your opponent. If you don’t have confidence, fake it. Seriously, it’s important. (...)
Your Stance
Your stance is the way you stand and position yourself during a fight. It’s by far the most important part of your actual fighting technique. Your base – the position of your feet and legs – determines how much power you can deliver in a blow. You should keep your feet about shoulder width apart, with your “strong” foot slightly forward (note: if you are a trained fighter, this advice might sound suspect, but follow me here: if you’ve never fought before, you have no idea what a “power hand” even is, much less how to use it. The main goal is to keep from being dragged around or pushed over, and a slightly even stance with strong foot forward is far more stable for a novice in a street fight). Your knees should NEVER be locked – keep them slightly bent, but not so much so that you feel a strain in your upper legs.
As far as your “guard” goes, there are any number of techniques and positions that you could adopt, but the most simple is your strong hand in front of your face, your weak hand slightly below it guarding your chin, and your elbows very slightly pointed outward guarding your chest.
Never, EVER drop your guard. Keep your hands in front of your vital areas at ALL times, unless actively delivering a blow or in the midst of grappling with someone.
Keep your chin tucked to your chest as much as possible, and ALWAYS keep your eyes up and on your opponent. You will find that, if you take away the chin and neck as targets, your chances of becoming disabled (knocked out or unable to breathe) are reduced by an order of magnitude. We’ll cover more of this in “Taking A Punch” – for now, you just need to know how to stand.
No shit, Sherlock.
Every single mens’ magazine who has ever attempted to publish an article like this has started (and ended) exactly that way and is usually devoid of any real information – sometimes because someone on the editorial staff wanted to avoid putting the periodical at risk for a lawsuit; other times because the author has absolutely no clue what they’re talking about, so they cop out with this “Verbal Judo Wins The Day!” crap. In fact, that’s precisely why I wrote this guide in the first place.
It’s common sense – avoid fighting if at all possible. No one likes to get hit (and if you do, there’s no need to go crawling pubs to find it. There’s any number of clubs filled with rubber-suited men and women who will give you a safety word and a few bruises for the right price…). But sometimes, diplomacy erodes to a good old fashioned bust-up, or worse, your opponent is just a big bully who’s looking to drive a knuckle into your nose. In either case, you are – at some point in your life – going to be called upon to defend yourself.So… What to do? Well, I can’t promise that the following information will turn you into a hands-of-steel cage fighter who can handle any MMA bruiser in a back-alley match… In fact, if you’re actually in NEED of the information in this article, I can guarantee you that a trained martial artist or fighter will destroy you. But all things being equal, if you’re simply an untrained person who’s facing a bully, or someone looking to simply get the basics under your belt in case something gnarly goes down, I can assure you that you’re way better off knowing this stuff than not.
Note: This guide has been on the net in some form or another for 9 years now. In that time, I’ve gotten lots and lots of feedback. I’ve decided to incorporate my notes on that feedback throughout this latest version. I’ve formatted those side notes like this — bold “Note:” and italic text — so you can tell at a glance which sections have been argued over (and over and over and over), and why I’ve decided to go with the advice that you read here.
Some things before we begin:
- I’m giving advice based entirely on my own experiences and training. There are as many opinions on fighting techniques, stances and behaviors are there are people fighting in the world, and really, there’s no “right” and “wrong” – simply “effective” and “ineffective”.
- My advice is intended specifically for inexperienced people for whom there is no escape from a fighting situation. Flight is not an option. Training is non-existent.
- The entire goal of the guide is to keep instruction minimal and intuitive – stuff you can readily recall when you’re in a dangerous situation, and stuff that won’t set a beginner / inexperienced person up for failure. “Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face” is true for a reason. Panic makes thinking tough.
First, you need to know a few things:
You are going to get hit.
When you get hit, it does not feel good.
Knowing and accepting those two things as fact will free your mind up enough to begin thinking about much more important stuff, like strategy and technique. If you’re petrified with fear over how much it’s going to hurt when the big bad guy hits you, you’re going to be out of focus. Thus, you’ll be much more vulnerable to taking damage than if you can just accept the reality of the situation and move past it… And perhaps, walk into the situation with a bit of confidence.
Confidence CANNOT be overvalued in a fight situation. If you walk in knowing you will win, your chances of winning are far greater… If for no other reason than the fact that you will gain a psychological edge on your opponent. If you don’t have confidence, fake it. Seriously, it’s important. (...)
Your Stance
Your stance is the way you stand and position yourself during a fight. It’s by far the most important part of your actual fighting technique. Your base – the position of your feet and legs – determines how much power you can deliver in a blow. You should keep your feet about shoulder width apart, with your “strong” foot slightly forward (note: if you are a trained fighter, this advice might sound suspect, but follow me here: if you’ve never fought before, you have no idea what a “power hand” even is, much less how to use it. The main goal is to keep from being dragged around or pushed over, and a slightly even stance with strong foot forward is far more stable for a novice in a street fight). Your knees should NEVER be locked – keep them slightly bent, but not so much so that you feel a strain in your upper legs.
As far as your “guard” goes, there are any number of techniques and positions that you could adopt, but the most simple is your strong hand in front of your face, your weak hand slightly below it guarding your chin, and your elbows very slightly pointed outward guarding your chest.
Never, EVER drop your guard. Keep your hands in front of your vital areas at ALL times, unless actively delivering a blow or in the midst of grappling with someone.
Keep your chin tucked to your chest as much as possible, and ALWAYS keep your eyes up and on your opponent. You will find that, if you take away the chin and neck as targets, your chances of becoming disabled (knocked out or unable to breathe) are reduced by an order of magnitude. We’ll cover more of this in “Taking A Punch” – for now, you just need to know how to stand.
by Joe Peacock, JP's Website Thing | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
The Perks of Being a Professional Protester
“Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”
— Donald Trump on Twitter
— Donald Trump on Twitter
George Soros is at every protest with a huge sack of cash. The money is amazing — he just gives it to you when you show up, and says, “Here is the cash! Thanks, my faithful protesting employees. My name is George Soros. This is happening in real life, you are not dreaming, and this is not an insane lie your president-elect is making up. I’m in multiple cities and countless college campuses across the country at once handing out money. Don’t ask how it’s possible, just take my cash!”
Some people grab a reasonable amount of money from the bag, like five or ten million dollars, but others can be greedy and take close to a billion. No biggie though, because Soros still has enough money to go around. He is a criminal wanted in a thousand countries across the world, but we don’t care because he’s paying us.
Luckily, there’s no one at the protest who is furious and terrified that a racist demagogue has taken power; a man who took days to denounce the hate crimes across the country being committed in his name, and who is pursuing deeply racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ policies, that put marginalized people’s lives at risk. The people who feel that way are really unprofessional, and I haven’t seen them at any protests. Even if they showed up, they probably wouldn’t be interested in the cold hard cash that us professional protestors crave.
Sure, sometimes things can get a little wild. Police brutality and militarization is very real, but it all comes with the territory. That’s why George pays us the big bucks. We’re professionals!
After a few “hard days” of protesting we hit the spa to kickback and relax. All of the robes are embroidered with the words PROFESSIONAL PROTESTER on them — super classy. I normally go for a hot stone treatment and a two-hour couples massage with one of my fellow protesters. Sure, it’s a little indulgent, but we just made five million dollars so why not live it up a little?
Later on, we usually engage in some retail therapy, buying high-end “street” clothes and fancy signage for future protests. I’m always on the hunt for an outfit that screams, I’ve been put up to this by the liberal elite and am being paid for my time here!
One of the slightly confusing things about professionally protesting is that sometimes you’ll hear about rallies in support of Donald Trump, done by people who aren’t being paid by anyone. Yes — incredibly, some people are gathering without getting paid. Crazy, right? That’s why it’s important for us pro protesters to focus on the money and not be distracted by rallies run by legitimate but non-paying organizations that support Trump, like the UFC and the KKK.
Possibly the best perk about being paid to protest is that it lets you feel like you actually support marginalized people, even if in the past you’ve criticized Black Lives Matter, denied the existence of systemic racism, or have never spoken out about sexism, homophobia, or transphobia in your life. And on top of that you get paid for it. It’s as easy as putting on a safety pin!
Some people grab a reasonable amount of money from the bag, like five or ten million dollars, but others can be greedy and take close to a billion. No biggie though, because Soros still has enough money to go around. He is a criminal wanted in a thousand countries across the world, but we don’t care because he’s paying us.
Luckily, there’s no one at the protest who is furious and terrified that a racist demagogue has taken power; a man who took days to denounce the hate crimes across the country being committed in his name, and who is pursuing deeply racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ policies, that put marginalized people’s lives at risk. The people who feel that way are really unprofessional, and I haven’t seen them at any protests. Even if they showed up, they probably wouldn’t be interested in the cold hard cash that us professional protestors crave.Sure, sometimes things can get a little wild. Police brutality and militarization is very real, but it all comes with the territory. That’s why George pays us the big bucks. We’re professionals!
After a few “hard days” of protesting we hit the spa to kickback and relax. All of the robes are embroidered with the words PROFESSIONAL PROTESTER on them — super classy. I normally go for a hot stone treatment and a two-hour couples massage with one of my fellow protesters. Sure, it’s a little indulgent, but we just made five million dollars so why not live it up a little?
Later on, we usually engage in some retail therapy, buying high-end “street” clothes and fancy signage for future protests. I’m always on the hunt for an outfit that screams, I’ve been put up to this by the liberal elite and am being paid for my time here!
One of the slightly confusing things about professionally protesting is that sometimes you’ll hear about rallies in support of Donald Trump, done by people who aren’t being paid by anyone. Yes — incredibly, some people are gathering without getting paid. Crazy, right? That’s why it’s important for us pro protesters to focus on the money and not be distracted by rallies run by legitimate but non-paying organizations that support Trump, like the UFC and the KKK.
Possibly the best perk about being paid to protest is that it lets you feel like you actually support marginalized people, even if in the past you’ve criticized Black Lives Matter, denied the existence of systemic racism, or have never spoken out about sexism, homophobia, or transphobia in your life. And on top of that you get paid for it. It’s as easy as putting on a safety pin!
by Colin Stokes, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: via:
On Vagueness
Imagine a heap of sand. You carefully remove one grain. Is there still a heap? The obvious answer is: yes. Removing one grain doesn’t turn a heap into no heap. That principle can be applied again as you remove another grain, and then another… After each removal, there’s still a heap, according to the principle. But there were only finitely many grains to start with, so eventually you get down to a heap with just three grains, then a heap with just two grains, a heap with just one grain, and finally a heap with no grains at all. But that’s ridiculous. There must be something wrong with the principle. Sometimes, removing one grain does turn a heap into no heap. But that seems ridiculous too. How can one grain make so much difference? That ancient puzzle is called the sorites paradox, from the Greek word for ‘heap’.
There would be no problem if we had a nice, precise definition of ‘heap’ that told us exactly how many grains you need for a heap. The trouble is that we don’t have such a definition. The word ‘heap’ is vague. There isn’t a clear boundary between heap and no heap. Mostly, that doesn’t matter. We get along well enough applying the word ‘heap’ on the basis of casual impressions. But if the local council charged you with having dumped a heap of sand in a public place, and you denied that it amounted to a heap, whether you had to pay a large fine might depend on the meaning of the word ‘heap’.
More important legal and moral issues also involve vagueness. For instance, in the process of human development from conception to birth to maturity, when is there first a person? In a process of brain death, when is there no longer a person? Such questions matter for the permissibility of medical interventions such as abortion and switching off life-support. To discuss them properly, we must be able to reason correctly with vague words such as ‘person’.
You can find aspects of vagueness in most words of English or any other language. Out loud or in our heads, we reason mostly in vague terms. Such reasoning can easily generate sorites-like paradoxes. Can you become poor by losing one cent? Can you become tall by growing one millimetre? At first, the paradoxes seem to be trivial verbal tricks. But the more rigorously philosophers have studied them, the deeper and harder they have turned out to be. They raise doubts about the most basic logical principles.
Traditionally, logic is based on the assumption that every statement is either true or false (and not both). That’s called bivalence, because it says that there are just two truth-values, truth and falsity. Fuzzy logic is an influential alternative approach to the logic of vagueness that rejects bivalence in favour of a continuum of degrees of truth and falsity, ranging from perfect truth at one end to perfect falsity at the other. In the middle, a statement can be simultaneously half-true and half-false. On this view, as you remove one grain after another, the statement ‘There is a heap’ becomes less and less true by tiny steps. No one step takes you from perfect truth to perfect falsity. Fuzzy logic rejects some key principles of classical logic, on which standard mathematics relies. For example, the traditional logician says, at every stage: ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’: that’s an instance of a general principle called excluded middle. The fuzzy logician replies that when ‘There is a heap’ is only half-true, then ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’ is only half-true too.
At first sight, fuzzy logic might look like a natural, elegant solution to the problem of vagueness. But when you work through its consequences, it’s less convincing. To see why, imagine two heaps of sand, exact duplicates of each other, one on the right, one on the left. Whenever you remove one grain from one side, you remove the exactly corresponding grain from the other side too. At each stage, the sand on the right and the sand on the left are exact grain-by-grain duplicates of each other. This much is clear: if there’s a heap on the right, then there’s a heap on the left too, and vice versa.
Now, according to the fuzzy logician, as we remove grains one by one, sooner or later we reach a point where the statement ‘There’s a heap on the right’ is half-true and half-false. Since what’s on the left duplicates what’s on the right, ‘There’s a heap on the left’ is half-true and half-false too. The rules of fuzzy logic then imply that the complex statement ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ is also half-true and half-false, which means that we should be equally balanced between accepting and rejecting it. But that’s absurd. We should just totally reject the statement, since ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ entails that there is a difference between what’s on the right and what’s on the left – but there is no such difference; they are grain-by-grain duplicates. Thus fuzzy logic gives the wrong result. It misses the subtleties of vagueness.
by Timothy Williamson, Aeon | Read more:
Image:mrhayata/Flickr
There would be no problem if we had a nice, precise definition of ‘heap’ that told us exactly how many grains you need for a heap. The trouble is that we don’t have such a definition. The word ‘heap’ is vague. There isn’t a clear boundary between heap and no heap. Mostly, that doesn’t matter. We get along well enough applying the word ‘heap’ on the basis of casual impressions. But if the local council charged you with having dumped a heap of sand in a public place, and you denied that it amounted to a heap, whether you had to pay a large fine might depend on the meaning of the word ‘heap’.More important legal and moral issues also involve vagueness. For instance, in the process of human development from conception to birth to maturity, when is there first a person? In a process of brain death, when is there no longer a person? Such questions matter for the permissibility of medical interventions such as abortion and switching off life-support. To discuss them properly, we must be able to reason correctly with vague words such as ‘person’.
You can find aspects of vagueness in most words of English or any other language. Out loud or in our heads, we reason mostly in vague terms. Such reasoning can easily generate sorites-like paradoxes. Can you become poor by losing one cent? Can you become tall by growing one millimetre? At first, the paradoxes seem to be trivial verbal tricks. But the more rigorously philosophers have studied them, the deeper and harder they have turned out to be. They raise doubts about the most basic logical principles.
Traditionally, logic is based on the assumption that every statement is either true or false (and not both). That’s called bivalence, because it says that there are just two truth-values, truth and falsity. Fuzzy logic is an influential alternative approach to the logic of vagueness that rejects bivalence in favour of a continuum of degrees of truth and falsity, ranging from perfect truth at one end to perfect falsity at the other. In the middle, a statement can be simultaneously half-true and half-false. On this view, as you remove one grain after another, the statement ‘There is a heap’ becomes less and less true by tiny steps. No one step takes you from perfect truth to perfect falsity. Fuzzy logic rejects some key principles of classical logic, on which standard mathematics relies. For example, the traditional logician says, at every stage: ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’: that’s an instance of a general principle called excluded middle. The fuzzy logician replies that when ‘There is a heap’ is only half-true, then ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’ is only half-true too.
At first sight, fuzzy logic might look like a natural, elegant solution to the problem of vagueness. But when you work through its consequences, it’s less convincing. To see why, imagine two heaps of sand, exact duplicates of each other, one on the right, one on the left. Whenever you remove one grain from one side, you remove the exactly corresponding grain from the other side too. At each stage, the sand on the right and the sand on the left are exact grain-by-grain duplicates of each other. This much is clear: if there’s a heap on the right, then there’s a heap on the left too, and vice versa.
Now, according to the fuzzy logician, as we remove grains one by one, sooner or later we reach a point where the statement ‘There’s a heap on the right’ is half-true and half-false. Since what’s on the left duplicates what’s on the right, ‘There’s a heap on the left’ is half-true and half-false too. The rules of fuzzy logic then imply that the complex statement ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ is also half-true and half-false, which means that we should be equally balanced between accepting and rejecting it. But that’s absurd. We should just totally reject the statement, since ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ entails that there is a difference between what’s on the right and what’s on the left – but there is no such difference; they are grain-by-grain duplicates. Thus fuzzy logic gives the wrong result. It misses the subtleties of vagueness.
by Timothy Williamson, Aeon | Read more:
Image:mrhayata/Flickr
NFL Games Are Taking Too Long – Here Are Eight Ways to Speed Things Up
Regular-season NFL games don’t get much more entertaining than the Dallas Cowboys’ 35-30 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday. There were seven lead changes, four in the last eight minutes. The Cowboys scored the winning touchdown with nine seconds remaining.
But now for the flip side: because there were 13 scoring plays, the game took 3 hours, 18 minutes to complete on the Fox network. More than three hours of that time were consumed by replays, analysis, Erin Andrews’ sideline reports and, yes, roughly 110 commercials.
The Guardian kept a stopwatch on Sunday’s game to deduct that the actual athletic competition – including kickoffs that resulted in touchbacks and plays negated by penalties – consumed almost exactly 15 minutes, or one-quarter of the 60 minutes on the game clock.
The action was terrific, with rookie Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott throwing touchdown passes of 83 and 50 yards. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was not to be outdone, faking a clock-stopping spike, then flinging a go-ahead touchdown pass with 42 seconds left.
Still, there were 30 commercial interruptions during the broadcast, with many commercials coming in “pods,” which the league calls those 2min, 20sec clusters of five or six ads that detractors say kill any sort of flow. Fans may feel like they’re enduring a game. (...)
Here, then, are eight ways to tighten the stretches of non-action:
1) Faster and fewer video reviews. Late in the first half on Sunday, an apparent 23-yard Pittsburgh pass play was reversed after a review dragged on for more than three minutes. But Troy Aikman, the ex-quarterback turned Fox commentator, had already said: “That looks pretty easy for me to determine it’s incomplete.” A replay official in the booth or even at NFL headquarters could have easily been used to make that call quicker.
2) Shave time between plays. The NFL mandates a maximum of 40 seconds between the end of a play and the snap of the ball for the next play. Sunday’s Cowboys-Steelers game included 125 official plays from scrimmage and seven punts, so even reducing the between-play limit to 35 seconds might have reduced the time of that game up to 12 minutes.
3) Running the clock earlier after incomplete passes. This would be a radical adjustment, but stopping the clock on incomplete passes until the next snap makes no sense any more, since the NFL has plenty of footballs, and no one has to chase down a loose ball to resume play. So how about running the clock after spotting the ball at the line of scrimmage?
This would alter the strategy of a losing quarterback spiking the ball late in the game to kill the clock, of course, but incomplete passes chew up a surprising amount of real time.
4) No more two-minute warnings. The two-minute warning was said to be devised as a way for the scoreboard operator to sync time with the on-field official who kept time, but the scoreboard has been official for nearly 50 years, and the two-minute warning was kept as a break for commercials. College football somehow survives without them, and its games are even longer.
5) Eliminate the chain gang. NFL officials have said they don’t want to do this because it is such a traditional part of the game, but the technology now exists to use some form of laser beams for quicker and more accurate measurements – and remove the need to stop the clock until the chain gang can hustle up to the new line of scrimmage after a long play.
But now for the flip side: because there were 13 scoring plays, the game took 3 hours, 18 minutes to complete on the Fox network. More than three hours of that time were consumed by replays, analysis, Erin Andrews’ sideline reports and, yes, roughly 110 commercials.
The Guardian kept a stopwatch on Sunday’s game to deduct that the actual athletic competition – including kickoffs that resulted in touchbacks and plays negated by penalties – consumed almost exactly 15 minutes, or one-quarter of the 60 minutes on the game clock.The action was terrific, with rookie Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott throwing touchdown passes of 83 and 50 yards. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was not to be outdone, faking a clock-stopping spike, then flinging a go-ahead touchdown pass with 42 seconds left.
Still, there were 30 commercial interruptions during the broadcast, with many commercials coming in “pods,” which the league calls those 2min, 20sec clusters of five or six ads that detractors say kill any sort of flow. Fans may feel like they’re enduring a game. (...)
Here, then, are eight ways to tighten the stretches of non-action:
1) Faster and fewer video reviews. Late in the first half on Sunday, an apparent 23-yard Pittsburgh pass play was reversed after a review dragged on for more than three minutes. But Troy Aikman, the ex-quarterback turned Fox commentator, had already said: “That looks pretty easy for me to determine it’s incomplete.” A replay official in the booth or even at NFL headquarters could have easily been used to make that call quicker.
2) Shave time between plays. The NFL mandates a maximum of 40 seconds between the end of a play and the snap of the ball for the next play. Sunday’s Cowboys-Steelers game included 125 official plays from scrimmage and seven punts, so even reducing the between-play limit to 35 seconds might have reduced the time of that game up to 12 minutes.
3) Running the clock earlier after incomplete passes. This would be a radical adjustment, but stopping the clock on incomplete passes until the next snap makes no sense any more, since the NFL has plenty of footballs, and no one has to chase down a loose ball to resume play. So how about running the clock after spotting the ball at the line of scrimmage?
This would alter the strategy of a losing quarterback spiking the ball late in the game to kill the clock, of course, but incomplete passes chew up a surprising amount of real time.
4) No more two-minute warnings. The two-minute warning was said to be devised as a way for the scoreboard operator to sync time with the on-field official who kept time, but the scoreboard has been official for nearly 50 years, and the two-minute warning was kept as a break for commercials. College football somehow survives without them, and its games are even longer.
5) Eliminate the chain gang. NFL officials have said they don’t want to do this because it is such a traditional part of the game, but the technology now exists to use some form of laser beams for quicker and more accurate measurements – and remove the need to stop the clock until the chain gang can hustle up to the new line of scrimmage after a long play.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial
[ed. So much angst over the last election and people wondering/second-guessing now what to do to blunt the results or make sure nothing like this ever happens again. Here's a start: get off Facebook. It's poison disguised as community. It's corporate business disguised as your friend. It's crack for psychological vulnerabilities you never knew existed. Yes your real friends use it and it feels wonderful to be connected and share, but you're being used and manipulated and sold (to advertisers, Wall Street) and it's killing rational discourse and traditional news sources that actually spend money to produce (and fact check) the news that Facebook profits off of. Is that too hard, quitting Facebook? Then look in the mirror at one of the prinicipal sources of your discontent. Here's an idea: if you really want to protest this election start with Facebook, then start hitting all the other capitalist manipulators and elite one-percenters where it really matters: in their pocketbooks. Forget dumb marches, and ironic posterboard signs, and meaningless editorials, and reorganizing a failed political party and system that acts in no one's interests but its own (as an aside... it's amazing that younger generations who hold the reins of technology and chafe under Boomers' lingering influence still cling to the same outdated protest game plan). Get real. Bernie and Elizabeth or Joe or anyone else isn't going to come save you if they have to work within that system. Let's have rolling boycotts of Facebook, and Walmart, and Comcast, and GE, and Exxon, and the banks, and anything Koch brothers related, and all the other companies that are killing our economy. Organize it and select a different corporation each month - or two, or however long it takes to make a dent in their balance sheets. Believe me, that's the only way you're going to get anyone's attention. Then people might realize they don't need to work within the system to effect a true populist revolution (call it a crowdsourced revolution). It starts with sacrifice. But if you can't even make that effort then all the whining and hand-wringing in the world won't make a bit of difference. See also: Social Media's Globe-Shaking Power.]
----
Donald J. Trump’s supporters were probably heartened in September, when, according to an article shared nearly a million times on Facebook, the candidate received an endorsement from Pope Francis. Their opinions on Hillary Clinton may have soured even further after reading a Denver Guardian article that also spread widely on Facebook, which reported days before the election that an F.B.I. agent suspected of involvement in leaking Mrs. Clinton’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.
There is just one problem with these articles: They were completely fake.
The pope, a vociferous advocate for refugees, never endorsed anyone. The Denver Guardian doesn’t exist. Yet thanks to Facebook, both of these articles were seen by potentially millions of people. Although corrections also circulated on the social network, they barely registered compared with the reach of the original fabrications.
This is not an anomaly: I encountered thousands of such fake stories last year on social media — and so did American voters, 44 percent of whom use Facebook to get news.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.
He is also contradicting Facebook’s own research.
In 2010, researchers working with Facebook conducted an experiment on 61 million users in the United States right before the midterm elections. One group was shown a “go vote” message as a plain box, while another group saw the same message with a tiny addition: thumbnail pictures of their Facebook friends who had clicked on “I voted.” Using public voter rolls to compare the groups after the election, the researchers concluded that the second post had turned out hundreds of thousands of voters.
In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts, while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts; those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social networks.
All of this renders preposterous Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook, a major conduit for information in our society, has “no influence.”
The problem with Facebook’s influence on political discourse is not limited to the dissemination of fake news. It’s also about echo chambers. The company’s algorithm chooses which updates appear higher up in users’ newsfeeds and which are buried. Humans already tend to cluster among like-minded people and seek news that confirms their biases. Facebook’s research shows that the company’s algorithm encourages this by somewhat prioritizing updates that users find comforting. (...)
Content geared toward these algorithmically fueled bubbles is financially rewarding. That’s why YouTube has a similar feature in which it recommends videos based on what a visitor has already watched.
It’s also why, according to a report in BuzzFeed News, a bunch of young people in a town in Macedonia ran more than a hundred pro-Trump websites full of fake news. Their fabricated article citing anonymous F.B.I. sources claiming Hillary Clinton would be indicted, for example, got more than 140,000 shares on Facebook and may well have been viewed by millions of people since each share is potentially seen by hundreds of users. Even if each view generates only a fraction of a penny, that adds up to serious money.
Of course, fake news alone doesn’t explain the outcome of this election. People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, but their information diet is a crucial part of the picture.
After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race. There are, of course, viral fake anti-Trump memes, but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left.
The Macedonian teenagers found this, too. They had experimented with left-leaning or pro-Bernie Sanders content, but gave up when they found it wasn’t as reliable a source of income as pro-Trump content. But even if Mr. Zuckerberg were right and fake news were equally popular on both sides, it would still be a profound problem.
Only Facebook has the data that can exactly reveal how fake news, hoaxes and misinformation spread, how much there is of it, who creates and who reads it, and how much influence it may have. Unfortunately, Facebook exercises complete control over access to this data by independent researchers. It’s as if tobacco companies controlled access to all medical and hospital records.
----
Donald J. Trump’s supporters were probably heartened in September, when, according to an article shared nearly a million times on Facebook, the candidate received an endorsement from Pope Francis. Their opinions on Hillary Clinton may have soured even further after reading a Denver Guardian article that also spread widely on Facebook, which reported days before the election that an F.B.I. agent suspected of involvement in leaking Mrs. Clinton’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.
There is just one problem with these articles: They were completely fake.
The pope, a vociferous advocate for refugees, never endorsed anyone. The Denver Guardian doesn’t exist. Yet thanks to Facebook, both of these articles were seen by potentially millions of people. Although corrections also circulated on the social network, they barely registered compared with the reach of the original fabrications.
This is not an anomaly: I encountered thousands of such fake stories last year on social media — and so did American voters, 44 percent of whom use Facebook to get news.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.He is also contradicting Facebook’s own research.
In 2010, researchers working with Facebook conducted an experiment on 61 million users in the United States right before the midterm elections. One group was shown a “go vote” message as a plain box, while another group saw the same message with a tiny addition: thumbnail pictures of their Facebook friends who had clicked on “I voted.” Using public voter rolls to compare the groups after the election, the researchers concluded that the second post had turned out hundreds of thousands of voters.
In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts, while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts; those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social networks.
All of this renders preposterous Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook, a major conduit for information in our society, has “no influence.”
The problem with Facebook’s influence on political discourse is not limited to the dissemination of fake news. It’s also about echo chambers. The company’s algorithm chooses which updates appear higher up in users’ newsfeeds and which are buried. Humans already tend to cluster among like-minded people and seek news that confirms their biases. Facebook’s research shows that the company’s algorithm encourages this by somewhat prioritizing updates that users find comforting. (...)
Content geared toward these algorithmically fueled bubbles is financially rewarding. That’s why YouTube has a similar feature in which it recommends videos based on what a visitor has already watched.
It’s also why, according to a report in BuzzFeed News, a bunch of young people in a town in Macedonia ran more than a hundred pro-Trump websites full of fake news. Their fabricated article citing anonymous F.B.I. sources claiming Hillary Clinton would be indicted, for example, got more than 140,000 shares on Facebook and may well have been viewed by millions of people since each share is potentially seen by hundreds of users. Even if each view generates only a fraction of a penny, that adds up to serious money.
Of course, fake news alone doesn’t explain the outcome of this election. People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, but their information diet is a crucial part of the picture.
After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race. There are, of course, viral fake anti-Trump memes, but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left.
The Macedonian teenagers found this, too. They had experimented with left-leaning or pro-Bernie Sanders content, but gave up when they found it wasn’t as reliable a source of income as pro-Trump content. But even if Mr. Zuckerberg were right and fake news were equally popular on both sides, it would still be a profound problem.
Only Facebook has the data that can exactly reveal how fake news, hoaxes and misinformation spread, how much there is of it, who creates and who reads it, and how much influence it may have. Unfortunately, Facebook exercises complete control over access to this data by independent researchers. It’s as if tobacco companies controlled access to all medical and hospital records.
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